Canada is a massive country with world-class cities, vast rural areas, and rugged lands. In the current age of connectedness, it is important to make high speed internet available across the entire country, not just in the urban centres.

Meet Xplornet Communications Inc. - Xplornet is Canada's largest rural broadband service provider, who believes every Canadian should have access to the transformative benefits of broadband internet – even in the hard to reach places. This incredibly fast-growing company is using fixed-wireless towers and cutting-edge satellites to deliver a national 4G network and they have rapidly grown to have more than 225,000 subscribers.

Knowing they had to think differently about how to deliver their service, they also thought long and hard about how they wanted to serve their most important asset – their customers. Today, the combination of more than 500 dealers, a 250 person contact centre, and instant customer engagement technology allows them to connect to their customers in new ways.

In 2010, it became obvious that they were outgrowing their existing systems. Installations were manually scheduled with dealers. Upgrading the speed of a customer’s service took 9 applications, 23 minutes on the phone and the speed would increase the next day! And the customer had little visibility into their services or account. Xplornet saw the opportunity to change and connect everyone together.

“We knew we were going to grow rapidly, and we needed tools to support our dealers, sales teams and service teams – and put our customers first”, says Cathy MacDonald, Executive Vice President, Information Systems, Billing, and Collections. “We needed a customer engagement platform that we could deploy quickly and allow us to remain agile as our business, customers and market changed. It’s the heartbeat of our business.”

Xplornet selected Salesforce1 Sales Cloud and Salesforce1 Service Cloud. The key to Xplornet’s success is the Salesforce Platform that allowed them to transform their business and rapidly integrate, customize and tailor Salesforce across their sales, service, dealer and customer operations.

“We knew we were going to grow rapidly, and we needed tools to support our dealers, sales teams and service teams — and put our customers first.”

For sales teams, Salesforce1 Sales Cloud is customized to include service availability and dealer locators, enabling Xplornet to instantly share how they can help the customer select the right service available in their location and schedule their professional installation.

For contact centre agents, Salesforce1 Service Cloud is the single point of truth, integrated to the billing and provisioning applications, their website and their customer portals. It has empowered their front-line agents to handle more actions directly driving up efficiency and ultimately making the customer’s experience more effortless. It’s changed that Upgrading Service process into one that is completed in less than 3 minutes.

Their more than 500 dealers across the country are integral to making the customer experience seamless. Xplornet deployed an online and mobile dealer portal that enabled dealers to collaborate on the scheduled installations, customer notes, look up customer services, and obtain installation or technical support. As well, Xplornet has been able to triple its service orders annually with the new environment.

Xplornet also connects to their customers through their products – their account and service information is confirmed through their first time activations, ensuring all the billing, contact and communication preferences are set, providing a seamless experience.

On top of it all, the Salesforce1 apps are mobile; meaning any user or executive has access to their most important functions while they are on the go. “Salesforce1 has been huge – it allows me to run my business from my phone!” says Serge Babin, EVP Operations.

Xplornet continues its rapid growth by putting their customer first with Salesforce1, connecting their sales, service, dealers and customers together in entirely new ways.